insight and advice on creating and exhibiting paintings, daily journel of artist Cooper, impressionistic fine art, acrylic art paintings, modern paintings of people

Friday, September 25, 2009

Mapping The Exhibit

Good morning,

Welcome to the Cooper studio.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the light bulb to turn on. I have been exhibiting at art fairs for 18 (?) years, and just now happened on a really great time saver. Let me share.

Being a 2D artist, painting, I am very determined to have a cohesive, well organized display. In the past, I would hang a couple of paintings, and then experiment to fill in around them. I could easily spend an hour moving paintings from one side of the exhibit to the other, before I was satisfied with the results.

The light bulb turned on (yea!) and now my average "hang" time is fifteen minutes. How, you say? A day or two prior to the event, while still at home, I make a map. How simple is that? All it takes is a sheet of white paper, in scale to my propanels, with correspondingly scaled images of the paintings I intend to display. Do you know how much easier it is to move paintings around when they are 3 x 3 INCHES and hung with double stick tape, than when they are 3 x 3 FEET and hung with metal hooks stuck into propanel fabric?

Once I get the "map" du jour completed to my satisfaction, I roll it up and stow it. Once at the exhibit, I set up the propanels, get the map out, and hang the paintings. Piece o'cake, right? Absolutely. Why-oh-why didn't I think of this sooner? But I've got it now, and it's a gem. Try it for yourself.

2 comments:

Your work looks wonderful! Are you interested in increasing your customer base?One way to increase your customer base is find art loving customers who buy artwork from other artists you know.I would like to invite you in joing the business card exchange.To read more about how this work please visit my blog and sign up if interested:http://quilt--works.blogspot.com/2009/09/business-card-exchange-network.html

I had to LOL because I have been in charge of hanging art at very large exhibits - we are talking over a 1000 pieces. Anyway, I showed up at my first such exhibit and the crew was waiting for me to begin instruction. I handed out my "maps" or "blueprint" of where everything was going to go. They were stunned. They had been doing it for 12 years and no one had ever thought to do it on paper first. What normally took 48 hours we did in 5.